After The EndAn end of the world game about group dynamics and survival.

Dreaming in GearsA Steam Punk fantasy game that combines the familiarity of D&D with the gameplay of a d100. Also a really cool read as it's written in character.

EraA really advanced Combat Sim. This particular adventure set featured at this link is Roman themed, but it works in any fantasy world.

Simple SystemA very fast setup/fast play system that I put together to play in a generic fantasy world

TimelessA setting agnostic game that derives game play from straight forward context of conversation. (another one I put together) i.e. "The lion has a deadly bite. A great hunter, It's an expert at taking down its prey." is game play langauge!

There's a couple settings for timeless I'm still working on. I'll probably post them once they have resources available.

Dungeon world is going wonderfully, if more silly than initially planned. But then that is what happens when you play with silly people. They party has kidnapped a prince to save him from his aunt and rioting peasants, after murdering his father. They plan on taking the prince to the Elven kingdoms for safe keeping and to have him raised well. The port city they are travelling from is run as a free merchant city, think the Borgias, and has 5 rules, one created by me then one by each of the players. they are as follows: 1)don't fuck with the merchant princes 2)no magic between midnight and dawn(like a noise ordinance) 3) no cats allowed, ever, under any circumstances 4) all contracts and deals are sealed with a shared alcoholic beverage, the same glass 5) [one I cannot remember right now]

clockworkmonk wrote:Dungeon world is going wonderfully, if more silly than initially planned. But then that is what happens when you play with silly people. They party has kidnapped a prince to save him from his aunt and rioting peasants, after murdering his father. They plan on taking the prince to the Elven kingdoms for safe keeping and to have him raised well. The port city they are travelling from is run as a free merchant city, think the Borgias, and has 5 rules, one created by me then one by each of the players. they are as follows: 1)don't fuck with the merchant princes 2)no magic between midnight and dawn(like a noise ordinance) 3) no cats allowed, ever, under any circumstances 4) all contracts and deals are sealed with a shared alcoholic beverage, the same glass 5) [one I cannot remember right now]

Naturally this has led to kitten smuggling.

This sounds like a friggin blast.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. -Kurt Vonnegut

According to Twitter they're hoping to have it released August-September.

I had the chance to play a slightly earlier version of this last October, when it was still called "Dungeoneers & Dragonslayers". I had an absolute blast playing it even though it resulted in a pretty fantastic TPK.

Man, wish I had known about BurningCon back when I was in NYC; I was just getting into Burning Wheel at the time (experimenting with the idea of a game set in Westeros). Are there other indie cons I should know about? Gen Con is in my sights this year, if I can get transportation.

2: Bundle of Holding +2. Basically like the humble indie bundles, but for indie tabletop rpgs. 6 (1 I own, 2 others I've played) great games if you pay more than the average. All DRM-free pdf's.http://bundleofholding.com/index/current

Played my 3rd ever one-shot of Monsterhearts at a con over the weekend. I'd definitely say the best session of it I've been in yet and it was with a group of people that had never played an Apocalypse World game/hack and a few hadn't even heard of any of those games before. I was a little worried at first because playing those style of games can be hard for some people. It sort of requires a different way of thinking generally, but everyone did really well. And the GM was excellent and keeping everyone on track and I think he started off the game with the perfect description: Monsterhearts is like Buffy if it were on Showtime. I can't think of a more succinct way to describe it.

I knew it was going to be a great session when less than 10 minutes into playing, the Fae character was seducing a football jock that was bullying my Ghoul character and went off to have sex in a bathroom stall. And it just kept being awesome.

I played a Ghoul which is someone that was possibly constructed or just brought back from the dead. Their main focus is hunger, which can be fear, chaos, flesh, or something else. I forget the 4th. I decided my character had been bullied a lot, but now that he'd been brought back as a Ghoul he wanted vengeance, so I started with a hunger for Fear.

Highlights include (all about my character since that's where my focus was):Lashing out at the football jocks that had bullied me all my life and trying to terrify them.Struggling with one of the jocks and eventually tackling him through a 3rd floor window. The impact killed us both.Coming back alive about an hour later thanks to one of my Ghoul moves.Terrorizing the student population as I succumbed to My Darkest Self (which requires me to pursue my hunger no matter who/what is in my way).

Spoilering the last few since they could potentially be sexual/violence triggers.

Spoiler:

Working my way through a crowd of students slashing around with a switchblade, eventually gaining a hunger for flesh and ripping pieces of flesh off anyone I could.Seducing one of the jocks in the locker room and cutting off pieces of skin while we had sex on the floor. Also, as a ghoul having sex with someone creates a new hunger on my list, "sex with <person>"And then later (because I was still in my darkest self) taking the same jock into a janitor's closet and having sex again. His tight embrace lasted long enough to knock me out of my darkest self (I have to be restrained for some time), but I fed on him completely until he died with his arms around me.It's worth noting that with him dead, I'd still have a hunger to have sex with him, which would either go unfulfilled or cause me to turn to necrophilia. Or possibly finding someone to raise him back as a Ghoul, like me.

It got quite dark and tragic at the end, which is exactly what I expect in Monsterhearts.

I really like the design of all the apocalypse world games. The Guy who did Monsterhearts also did a free generic game using the same engine as apoclypse world, Simple World. It has pretty straight forward systems that my girlfriend and I once adapted to use for star trek for 8 year olds.

Also, last Saturday I had a chance to both run and play Everyone Is John. the basic idea is that the players are the voices in John's head. They take turns being in control of John and try to accomplish a secret goal.

The goals for the game I played in were to convince people to do the Macarena, dance on the edge of the tallest building, and to convert people to Islam. Good times.

Everyone Is John has been on my radar for a while I've just never had a chance to give it a go. I've heard good things, though. Sounds fun.

Currently I'm reading through Torchbearer since the pdf was released to Kickstarter backers over the weekend. Man, there's some hot stuff in here. I really can't wait to play it sometime. I'd been planning to run Dungeon World for my group soon, but if I finish Torchbearer soon enough, I might run with it instead.

I've had some good times with Everyone is John. I tend to expect the game to get deeper and more subtle than it does, but it's a good party game for those at least comfortable with the concept of an rpg (I've played it with people who know what an rpg is and arw cool with it but have never played one before to good effect. Less successful than if they don't know what an rpg is whatsoever).

Oh, yeah, I know Jason. I playtested it a few years back at GenCon. Got my copy in the mail last week sometime.

I haven't had a chance to read through it yet, though, but I'm excited to look through it and hopefully play at some point. I remember enjoying what I got to play of it that one time, so I'm looking forward to seeing how it's evolved since then.

Anyhow, fantastic game. I've ran it twice and it's a blast. The premise is that the players are god-killers (Mythenders) out to rid the world of the gods (Myths). The default setting is "Mythic Norden", so Nordic gods like Thor, Odin, & Loki. But it's pretty easy to hack in other settings.

It's fairly crunchy and very satisfying to play. There's a lot of physical components: rolling lots of dice and collecting different sorts of tokens for things. I'm not exaggerating when I say you'll want a couple hundred dice (shared between players) to be able to play.

Anyhow, fantastic game. I've ran it twice and it's a blast. The premise is that the players are god-killers (Mythenders) out to rid the world of the gods (Myths). The default setting is "Mythic Norden", so Nordic gods like Thor, Odin, & Loki. But it's pretty easy to hack in other settings.

It's fairly crunchy and very satisfying to play. There's a lot of physical components: rolling lots of dice and collecting different sorts of tokens for things. I'm not exaggerating when I say you'll want a couple hundred dice (shared between players) to be able to play.

pseudoidiot wrote:It is really awesome. I've seen few games that are able to teach themselves so well. The way the tutorial battle is laid out is really fantastic and a huge help to get introduced into the game.

Doing it on Halloween would be a great excuse to come up with a Halloween-themed Myth for the players to fight!

If you look at Ryan's blog post he links to an AP from Wil Wheaton where he talks about the game they played where the Myth was Santa Clause.

I hope you get to play and enjoy it.

In one of my other games (Cortex based), one of the PCs was Ichabod Crane, the Incarnation of Fear.

I think we're going to go show him who is boss.

"Does this smell like chloroform to you?""Google tells me you are not unique. You are, however, wrong."nɒʜƚɒɿ_nɒɿɘ

So I'm putting together a Con-game of Dungeon World in Spelljammer, and am working on custom playbooks. So far I got some Ideas and will be posting some here in the future. as of right now I've come up with the roles to be filled with descriptions I will give the players as they will not be allowed to see the character sheet before picking:

The Captain: You are in charge, and decides the big important things.The Weaponmaster: You are in charge of the weapons, be it cannons or swords.The Cook: You make sure there is enough food, and distribute it properly. The Wizard: Every spelljamming vessel needs someone magically inclined to make it go. You're itThe Barber: You takes care of several odds and ends, including medicine.The Gnome: You keep the ship repaired, and always have a "helpful" suggestion for any situation.The Seaman: You work on the ship, doing jobs as ordered.The Seaman(actually a spy): You work on the ship, doing jobs as ordered.

Nice! Are you active on the DW forums or the G+ group? If you need input the folks there are pretty fantastic.

Speaking of Dungeon World, as well as some other fantastic games. Pay what you want for a bundle of really great indie games. I already owned most of these, but I went ahead and put in to get the ones that I don't. And there's usually some games that get added over time (Becoming just got added today).

Anyhow, fantastic game. I've ran it twice and it's a blast. The premise is that the players are god-killers (Mythenders) out to rid the world of the gods (Myths). The default setting is "Mythic Norden", so Nordic gods like Thor, Odin, & Loki. But it's pretty easy to hack in other settings.

It's fairly crunchy and very satisfying to play. There's a lot of physical components: rolling lots of dice and collecting different sorts of tokens for things. I'm not exaggerating when I say you'll want a couple hundred dice (shared between players) to be able to play.

I just went to Origins Game Fair in Columbus and played a lot of fantastic games: No Country for Old Kobolds (kobolds are squishy, some nods to Kobolds Ate My Baby), Dark (stealth action), The Devil, John Moulton (selling your soul for powers in the old west), Spark (challenging beliefs and convictions), Night Witches (historical rpg based on female Russian bomber pilots in WWII), The Climb (mentioned in the previous post), Juggernaut (dealing with a future-prediction computer that is never wrong in 1950), Swords Without Master (epic Sword & Sorcery), Feng Shui II (high octage Hong Kong martial arts action movie), Urban Shadows (dark/gritty urban fantasy), World Wide Wrestling (wrestling rpg in and out of the ring).

I had a pretty fantastic time. Games on Demand at Origins was run really well. It was a great experience. I'll definitely be going back.

So for several weeks now I have been running a weekly dungeon world game that is open to anybody. It is a Hex exploration game, built around the idea that I got tired of flaky people so I just got rid of the need for people to show up regularly.

Nice! I'm very saddened by how little I've actually played Dungeon World. I haven't ever actually played the release version. I played their red box version once at Gen Con and I played an updated version a year or so after that, but I haven't actually played the published edition. heh

There's always so many other games to play

My group's currently playing a short campaign of Urban Shadows which I absolutely love. Urban fantasy powered by the apocalypse. So good!

My fav is Dungeon Crawl Classics. Dunno if it counts as small press anymore...but probably. Nowhere close to any of the big players in size, and I've hung out with many of the writers involved.

Sword and Sorcery styled, with a very 70s vibe. Many published adventures are "funnels", which means each player runs several characters that are essentially some variety of peasant, dealing with something that way outmatches them. Death is...very frequent.

Kobold Story: the group of players control a tribe of kobolds, usually working for a Nechromancer. Expect lots of dead kobolds and much laughter, as things become sillier and more absurd quite quickly.

How did I go over 3 years without gushing over some new indie game I was playing. Oh well time to dive back in!

Last night I got the opportunity to play Ten Candles. Hot damn did I love the game. It's a game of tragic horror. In fact it's a given that all of the characters will die by the end of the session. I'm generally not interested much in horror, but I'm all for tragedy.

The setting/premise is pretty good:

Ten days ago the world went dark. No sun, no stars, no moon. No communication with satellites. No GPS. Society starts breaking down.

Five days ago "They" came. We don't know much about them. But we know they're coming for all of us. And we know they hate the light.

Everyone keeps their lights on all the time. The grid can't handle the drain. Society breaks down further.

Then there are some starting scenarios that kind of change the feel of things. We did the basic one of just trying to get out of town and to a (relatively) nearby military base. There's one where you're astronauts on a moon base after the moon also went dark. Or one where you're scientists trying to research what's going on. Lots of room for different types of setups like that.

The game is played entirely in the dark, with the only light being 10 tea candles. Each candle represents a scene, so the game plays out in (at most) ten scenes. When a scene ends (usually due to a failed roll), a candle is extinguished. If a candle ever goes out for any other reason, the scene ends.

Each scene will have some number of challenges to overcome, which is done by rolling dice. There's a pool of dice that's equal to the number of lit candles. Get at least one six and you succeed and you get to narrate what happens. There are ways for the GM to narrate your success, but it's still overall a success. Also, any 1s you rolled are set aside, they can't be used for the remainder of the scene. So any subsequent challenges will become more difficult until someone eventually fails and the scene ends.

Also every character has some index cards with traits on them that can be used for a one time mechanical advantage (re-roll 1s). To do so simply burn the card the trait is written on. There are some other other cards that do slightly different but similar things, but that's the basics.

There's also this really cool world-building/pacing mechanic that happens between every scene. All players (and the GM) go around the table and get to introduce truths into the game. The number of truths equals the number of currently lit candles. You can foreshadow things (the group is being followed through the woods), or get a nice windfall (we found some supplies), get things really dire (Tommy fell down the ravine and broke his leg real bad), or just get the game moving along (we make it to the next town over). It's a really cool way to add some extra color to things, set up future things, and keep things going so scenes don't stagnate too much.

And then in the last scene everyone dies. Once everyone is dead the last candle is extinguished.

I love pretty much everything about the game and I can't wait to give it another go. I highly, highly recommend it!

For sure. It definitely requires some significant upfront buy-in. That's why the game is very clear about it being tragic and everyone dying. No surprises on that front. And it's definitely not something I'd want to pull out all the time for sure. But for what the game does and the kind of story it emulates? It does it really damn well.

Does anyone know about the game Mouse Guard where you play as like sentient mice or something? I saw it at my local small times tabletop RPGs store and never bought it yet was intrigued because... mousies? <3 :)

Amy Lee wrote:Just what we all need... more lies about a world that never was and never will be.

Azula to Long Feng wrote:Don't flatter yourself, you were never even a player.

Ginger wrote:Does anyone know about the game Mouse Guard where you play as like sentient mice or something? I saw it at my local small times tabletop RPGs store and never bought it yet was intrigued because... mousies? <3

I know it. I have some of the comic books the game is based on and I've played the game once. It's a great setting and I really enjoyed it.